How does an established franchise relaunch itself to appeal to an audience whose taste has evolved? The secret history of the ultimate Marvel traces the success of the new series to a Hail Mary maneuver, an experiment:

A reboot is a delicate thing. When a once-profitable franchise of characters becomes stale, outdated, or overly complex, there will always be voices calling for the slate to be wiped clean: to take the characters back to their basics, retell their origin stories, make them contemporary. But all too often, those rebooting efforts are laughable, pandering failures. Ultimate Marvel was the rare exception. It was a compendium of stories that saved the company that launched it, revolutionized the comics medium, and became the foundation of the multi-billion-dollar Marvel cinematic empire.

While the initiative could have failed, its success was due to the willingness of the writer. Brian Michael Bendis wrote the first comic of the Ultimate line and will be writing the final one:

According to Bendis — the alpha and omega of Ultimate Marvel storytelling — the key to the reboot was understanding what made the old Marvel archetypes worth rebooting in the first place.

“The transition that we made was based on the fact that the concept of Spider-Man wasn't broken,” he told me. “The Spider-Man origin and its themes are pretty much perfect. So adaptations are much like a Shakespeare play: The trick isn't to fix it and say you know better than Shakespeare. It's to find the truth of it and keep the truth going for a new audience.”

“When you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.” It must be empowering for those who have struggled with depression to read this book, see themselves, and know they’re far from alone.

He organizes each chapter around a question (e.g., “What is the sun?”) and begins the chapter with a litany of colorful explanatory myths offered by different cultures around the world. Then he shows us the elegant answers science has offered as the power of direct and indirect detection has expanded through the years. “I hope you agree that the truth has a magic of its own,” he writes. “The truth is more magical—in the best and most exciting sense of the word—than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle.”

What If? may not be quite as funny as XKCD, but it’s a lot more interesting. The subtitle of the book is “Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions,” and that’s exactly what it is. People write Munroe with questions that range over all fields of science: physics, chemistry, biology. Questions like, “From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?” The answer, it turns out, is “high enough that it would disintegrate before it hit the ground.” Another question: “What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?” to which the answer is, essentially, the human race would be wiped out.

What makes this book so good and unusual is how effortlessly Biss moves around different topics. Her father is an oncologist and her mother a poet, which probably helps to explain how Biss so easily navigates the worlds of science and literature. And she’s just as good when she draws on insights from psychology, sociology, women’s studies, history, and philosophy.One of the virtues of crossing so many boundaries is that it helps expand the way we view these issues.

The richer the world gets, the more meat it eats; the more meat it eats, the bigger the threat to the planet. How do we square this circle?

I can’t think of anyone better equipped to present a clear-eyed analysis of this subject than Vaclav Smil. I have written several times before about how much I admire Smil’s work. When he tackles a subject, he doesn’t look at just one piece of it. He examines every angle. Even if I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, I always learn a lot from reading him.

We are at our happiest and most successful when we are working as improvisers. When we are fiercely following the elements of improvisation, we generate ideas both quickly and efficiently; we're more engaged with out coworkers; our interactions with clients become richer or more long-standing; we weather rough storms with more aplomb, and we don't work burdened by fear of failure.

When we are in full improviser mode, we become better leaders and better followers; likewise, we hear things that we didn't hear before because we are listening deeply and fully in the moment.

When he interviewed Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, Adam Bryant learned that when hiring the company looks for certain qualities that go beyond coding. Such qualities are “the ability to process on the fly,” a “willingness to relinquish power,” “ease with creating space for others to contribute,” and “individuals who can learn how to learn from failure.”

They are the qualities of an improviser, and they can be learned:

practicing improvisation is like yoga for your professional development -- a solid, strengthening workout that improves emotional intelligence, teaches you to pivot out of tight and uncomfortable spaces, and helps you become both a more compelling leader and a more collaborative follower.

Even better, these qualities are fully transferable to your life outside the office. The benefits of improvisation can extend to your personal relationships, whether with your partner, your family, or your friends.

The book is divided into eight chapters, and includes a back story on the writing collaboration.

1. The business of funny

Sets the stage for the seven elements of improv that follow. This is something we don't typically learn in business school, yet we want to fill the room with truth and trust:

Laughter can be part of that. The one piece they don't teach you in business school is the role of laughter and humor, [yet], I can't think of a single important contract, acquisition, sale, event -- for that matter any hiring or firing that I've done -- when there hasn't been some humor in it, or some laughter.

[...] professional success often rests on the same pillars that form the foundation of great comedy improv: Creativity, Communication, and Collaboration.

2. Yes, and: how to make something out of nothing

The first element is the bedrock of all improvisation:

Creative breakthroughs occur in environments where ideas are not just fully explored, but heightened and stretched to levels that might seem absurd at first.

[...] Work cultures that embrace Yes, And are more inventive, quicker to solve problems, and more likely to have engaged employees that organizations where ideas are judged, criticized, and rejected too quickly.

It's not about acting out on everything, but giving every idea a chance.

3. How to build an ensemble

We work as sales teams, executive boards, retail staff, to become competitive, and yet:

little attention is paid to building, maintaining, and developing ensembles.

The consequences of that oversight are all around us, from the conference room full of smart people more interested in showing off their brain power than actually solving a problem to the leader who takes credit for success and dodges accountability for failure, to the individual who whitewashes all of his or her problems.

Many great performances and stars developed out of ensembles.

4. The co-creation story, or audience want in on the act

The sum of co-creation is greater than its parts:

dialogues push stories further than monologues.

[...] in our increasingly connected world, co-creation is fast becoming a fact of life. Unfortunately, it is not usually taught or applied in the very corners where it is needed most.

5. Change is hard: comedy and improvisation make it easier

Authenticity paves the way for shared truth:

Rather than pretend that problems and failure don't exist, strong leaders and organizations acknowledge what is not working. They encourage team members and demonstrate their respect for the organization by questioning the status quo, challenging assumptions and traditions that may not be working, and calling out the truth, even when the truth is hard to hear.

[...] comedy and irreverence are lubricants that encourage people to reconsider long-standing beliefs that may be holding them back.

As in everything, mastery is in learning to navigate the fine line between respect and reverence.

6. Using failure

More than an abstraction, failure is:

something we commit to every time we walk on stage.

[...] by acknowledging the mistake and incorporating it in the narrative, something new and unexpected happens that makes the audience go wild.

Too often we are told that failure is not an option, but the opposite is true. It's vital to give failure a role in your process. The biggest threat to creativity is fear, especially the fear of failure. By deflating the negative power of failure, you erode fear and allow creativity to flourish.

Failure should be baked into the creative process, a necessary, even interesting means to an end.

7. Follow the follower

When Peter Drucker introduced the concept of the knowledge worker and the idea of flat organizations, American theater and improv pioneer Viola Spolin proposed “Follow the follower:”

as a more active and dynamic way to provide leadership while working within and ensemble. It is a principle that gives the group the flexibility to allow any member to assume leadership for as long as his or her expertise is needed, and then to shuffle the hierarchy again once the group's needs change.

[...] Leadership is more about understanding status than maintaining status. In other words, it's about recognizing the great power that comes in giving up the role of top dog on occasion.

8. Listening is a muscle

Listening is critical to many parts of business:

Many of us believe that we are good listeners, but there is a huge difference between listening to understand and listening while waiting for a chance to respond. One enriches and broadens our perspective; the other feeds our need to be right and in control of the conversation.

[...] most of the world operates in the listening-to-respond mode.

Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton say:

When people no longer feel limited to saying what is right or polite -- when they are given freedom to express themselves in public, without inhibition or fear -- that's when the funny happens.

The book teaches us how to use the tools of improv comedy to communicate more openly and honestly, especially during the most difficult conversations.

Children feel the excitement of learning more strongly than the fear of the unknown. For adults the balance is reversed: we stop learning when we’re afraid of leaving the safety of what we know. When I arrived in the US I wasn’t fluent in English.

I realized that in order to get what I wanted, I needed to commit to change—to immerse myself in this new experience. Since then I’ve worked to make learning through experience a habit: a continuous process of commitment. When you make learning a habit, you connect with your inner child and discover new opportunities.

The techniques in the talk illustrate how to:

make space for learning by letting go of habits that aren’t serving you well

ask for help and trust the learning process

experiment to discover what works for you

Like many important things in life, twenty minutes packed quite a bit of learning, and fun. Check out all the sessions.

Social psychologist Amy Cuddy's research on body language reveals that we can change other people’s perceptions — and even our own body chemistry — simply by changing body positions.

When we become aware of our body posture, we may find that we're hunching over, or maybe we spread out. We notice those things in others. Amy Cuddy says:

we're really fascinated with body language, and we're particularly interested in other people's body language. You know, we're interested in an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake.

We communicate with our body, not just our words.

a handshake, or the lack of a handshake, can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks. Even the BBC and The New York Times. So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior, or body language — but we call it nonverbals as social scientists — it's language, so we think about communication. When we think about communication, we think about interactions. So what is your body language communicating to me? What's mine communicating to you?

It has been scientifically proven that a handshake creates better cooperation and trust between humans. A handshake has a powerful effect on us -- even when it is that of a robot. After conducting experiments using a 58-cm tall humanoid robot in mock real estate negotiations, researcher Dr Chris Bevan, of the University of Bath's Department of Psychology, said:

“This experiment highlights just how important the symbolic ritual of shaking hands is upon the way people come to judge others as being trustworthy and willing to cooperate.“Using a robotic avatar, we were able to demonstrate that this effect holds true even when a person cannot see the face of their counterpart.”

Body language is rich with human data that influences who we elect, and even if a physician will be sued. Cuddy says:

social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language, or other people's body language, on judgments. And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language. And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date.

Though we may pay attention to the body language of others, we often neglect to notice our own posture. When we feel victorious and powerful, we use expansive gestures, just like other primates. While we tend to close up to protect ourselves when we feel powerless -- humans and animals alike.

Noticing the disparity in how people show up for their MBA classes, Cuddy and her main main collaborator Dana Carney wanted to learn if it is possible to feel powerful by pretending to be powerful. They set out to answer whether it was possible for our bodies to change our minds.

powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. They actually feel they're going to win even at games of chance. They also tend to be able to think more abstractly. There are a lot of differences. They take more risks. There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people.

Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone. What we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol. What does that mean? When you think about power, people tended to think only about testosterone, because that was about dominance.

Power is also about how you react to stress. Do you want the high-power leader that's dominant, high on testosterone, but really stress reactive? Probably not, right? You want the person who's powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back.

They decided to conduct small experiments with people by asking them to stand or sit in a certain way. Then they would ask them how they felt:

this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, we find that when you are in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. When you're in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that's a whopping significant difference.

Here's what we find on testosterone. From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease. Two minutes, and you get these changes.

Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. Two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down. And we've all had the feeling, right? It seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves. Also, our bodies change our minds.

Can power posing for a few minutes change our lives meaningfully? Some people may feel like impostors for trying. Amy Cuddy is herself an example of how this principle works. At 19 she was in a bad car accident after which she learned her I.Q. had dropped by two standard deviations and she had been withdrawn from college.

Through hard work, Cuddy graduated from college and ended up at Princeton:

I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske, to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton, and I was like, I am not supposed to be here. I am an impostor. And the night before my first-year talk, and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk to 20 people. That's it.

I was so afraid of being found out the next day that I called her and said, “I'm quitting.”

She was like, “You are not quitting, because I took a gamble on you, and you're staying. You're going to stay, and this is what you're going to do. You are going to fake it. You're going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do. You're just going to do it and do it and do it, even if you're terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience, until you have this moment where you say, 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing it. Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this.'”

So that's what I did.

We can not only “fake it until we make it” -- we can fake it until we become it.

I want to say to you, don't fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it. Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize.

Play or game symbolizes how we show up in life. Of particular interest is the part on storytelling. He says:

“Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Storytelling is therefore not combative; it does not succeed or fail.

A story cannot be obeyed. Instead of placing one body of knowledge against another, storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounding way of looking to an horizontal way of seeing.”

For example, companies that want to know what to do with the reams of data they collect first need to make clarity around goals, what they are trying to accomplish and what constitutes success, and from that know what to measure.

What's the difference in mindset to go from a finite to an infinite game? As Carse says:

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning; an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play

The rules of the finite game may not change; the rules of the infinite game must change

Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries

Finite players are serious; infinite games are playful

A finite player plays to be powerful; an infinite player generates time

The finite player aims for eternal life; the infinite player aims for eternal birth

Many books attempt to prove or disprove a thesis and exhaust you by asking you to expend energy in going through the reasons why / why not. Carse shares his vision of how to reinterpret the world and lets the reader free to draw personal insights.

This is a book about patterns. For another fascinating read on patters, pair with Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building where a pattern is a way to solve a specific problem, by bringing two conflicting forces into balance. In architecture, patterns are ways to arrange materials to facilitate access and enjoyment of focal points. For example, if window where people can enjoy a view creates a focal point, you will want to arrange the furniture inside that room to harmonize with that goal.

The same happens with other situations in life. When a situation makes us unhappy, it is usually because we have two conflicting goals, and we aren't balancing them well. Alexander's idea is to identify those conflicting forces, and then find a solution to bring them into harmony. He says:

“... every pattern we define must be formulated in the form of a rule which establishes a relationship between a context, a system of forces which arises in that context, and a configuration which allows these forces to resolve themselves in that context. It has the following generic form: Context, System of forces, Configuration.”

Whether to develop a system, a taxonomy, or a structure, the book is a useful resource.

In a talk he gave a few years ago, renowned psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo explains how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. We have different relationships with time, says Zimbardo:

what we have discovered in 30 years of research there are six main time ones that people live in; two focused on the past; two on the present and two on the future.

The people who focus on the past either remember all the good old times, successes, happy birthdays, nostalgia, these are the people who keep the family records, the family books, who preserve the family rituals. There are other people who focus only on regret, only on failure, only on all the things that went wrong. So we call those focus past positive, or past negative.

There are two ways to be present oriented, the most obvious is to be hedonistic, that you live for pleasure and you avoid pain. You seek knowledge, you seek sensation. There are other people who are present oriented because they say, “It doesn’t pay to plan. My life is fated – fated by my religion, my poverty, the conditions that I'm living under.”

Most of us are here because we are future oriented, that we have learnt to work rather than play, to resist temptation. But there’s another way to be future oriented, depending on your religion life begins after the death of the mortal body. To be future oriented you have to trust that when you make a decision about the future it’s going to be carried out. If you have great inflation you don’t put money in the bank because you can't trust the future. If you have instability in your family adults can't keep their promises to you.

Through experiments, Levine looks at time perspective, at how people divide their own experience into partitions, time zones. On the speed of life, or tempo Levine asks the question, “what characteristics of places and cultures make them faster or slower?” The two elements for consideration are “economic well-being” and “degree of industrialization.”

Our treatment of time depends on culture, perception, and state of mind. With that in mind, Zimbardo did:

a recent study with USA Today asking Americans how busy they are. The vast majority of Americans, more than 50% said, “I'm busier now than I was last year. I was busier last year than the previous year and I sacrificed friends, family and sleep for my success.” This is across the board, not separating by future orientation.

And then we said, “Suppose you had an eight day week what would you do?” They say, “Oh that would be great.” They would spend most of that time working harder, achieving more, not with friends, not with family and not even sleeping.

Reorienting how we think about what happens to us is helpful. He says:

many of life’s puzzles can be solved by simply understanding our own time perspective and that of others. Lots of conflict we have with people is really a conflict in the different time perspectives.

Once you’re aware of that you stop making negative attributions like, you're dumb or you’re childish or you're pig-headed or you're authoritarian. It’s really the most simple idea in the world.

Along with Apollo 13, Splash, Parenthood, The Da Vinci Code, Frost/Nixon, J. Edgar and more, Brian Grazer produced A Beautiful Mind, a story directed by Ron Howard -- his business partner -- and interpreted by Russel Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, and Paul Bethany. The movie won 4 Academy Awards.

In A Curious Mind, written with Charles Fishman, Grazer reveals how he got started meeting with people from diverse backgrounds to have open-ended conversations about their lives and work. Early in his career, he learned that to broaden his horizons, he needed to escape the Hollywood bubble:

“I have to feed my curiosity,” he says, “or I’ll end up in a bubble here in Hollywood, isolated from what’s going on in the rest of the world. I use curiosity to pop the bubble and keep complacency at bay. And storytelling gives me the ability to tell everyone what I’ve learned.”

“the truth is when I was meeting someone like Salk or Teller, or Slim, what I hoped for was an insight, a revelation. I wanted to grasp who they were. Of course, you don't usually get that with strangers.

[...] For me, when I'm learning from someone who is right in front of me, it's better than sex. It's better than success.”

Many successful careers are forged on good relationships and curiosity opens us to learning as well as building human connections. When he met criminal trial attorney F. Lee Bailey (he had been the lawyer for Sam Shepard and Patty Hearst), Grazer says his curiosity questions were:

“He was winning a lot of important cases. How did he pick them? Does he have a moral compass? How does he communicate int he courtroom -- with facts? With Legal points? With the morality of the case?

I wanted to understand the distinction between a lawyer's belief system and what he or she was good at. What was Bailey's purpose in life, and how did that mesh with his talents?”

These are likely versions of questions we have about someone we admire and have been too shy to ask, or dismissed the thought for fear of rejection. Curiosity, says Grazer, is very useful in life and in business:

“I'm a boss -- Ron Howard and I run Imagine [Entertainment] together -- but I am not much of an order giver. My management style is to ask questions. If someone's doing something I don't understand, or don't like, if someone who works for me is doing something unexpected, I start out asking questions. Being curious.”

“Authentic human connection requires curiosity,” says Grazer. He also says that asking questions allows you to understand how other people are thinking about your idea. For example, when people say “no,” and they say that a lot -- in Hollywood as in all kinds of businesses -- he says it's important to understand what they are saying no to. Do you need to re-contextualize your story?

Rather than a set measurement, in digital experiences the fold, or the portion of the webpage that is visible without scrolling, is a concept. In the fold manifesto, Amy Shade says:

The fold matters because what appears at the top of your page matters. Users do scroll, but only if what’s above the fold is promising enough. What is visible on the page without requiring any action is what encourages us to scroll. This is true on any size screen, be it mobile, tablet, or desktop: anything that’s hidden and that the user must uncover will only be seen if the user deems it worth the hassle.

It's a matter of cognitive leaks or energy your audience needs to expend to figure out whether they want to look further. We look at what we find at the top of a search page. This behavior transfers to how we interact with web sites overall.

Invisible and requiring an action to be made visible (i.e., below the fold, or otherwise hidden) = higher interaction cost, consisting of (a) the mental effort of guessing that something is hidden and having to make the positive decision to reveal the content, and (b) the physical effort of doing what is required to see the content (e.g., scrolling the page).

Yes, even web pages need to build a solid story to elicit further action, like scrolling. Based on qualitative and quantitative research:

84% is the average difference in how users treat info above vs. below the fold

What I mean when I think about finding your voice is working in a way that is true to who you are. Work is an expression of self, and if it is not true to it, there is no joy in the doing. Finding the child in you, letting curiosity guide you in solving problems, and tapping into love are all good side effects of this process.

Successful collaborations and experiences are created by design, and call for empathy. A definition of empathy is “experiencing emotions that match another person’s emotions.” Or as we would say to put yourself in their shoes. It's a valid exercise beyond research and helpful when we apply the same level of thoughtful listening to ourselves.

The inspiration for “Just Breathe” first came about a little over a year ago when I overheard my then 5-year-old son talking with his friend about how emotions affect different regions of the brain, and how to calm down by taking deep breaths — all things they were beginning to learn in Kindergarten at their new school, Citizens of the World Charter School, in Mar Vista, CA. I was surprised and overjoyed to witness first-hand just how significant social-emotional learning in an elementary school curriculum was on these young minds. The following year, I decided to take a 6-week online course on Mindfulness through Mindful Schools, figuring that if my son was learning about this, it only made sense that I should learn too. Within the first week, I felt the positive effects of this practice take root not only on my own being but in my relationships with others.

[...] We made “Just Breathe” with our son, his classmates and their family members one Saturday afternoon. The film is entirely unscripted – what the kids say is based purely on their own neuro-scientific understanding of difficult emotions, and how they cope through breathing and meditation. They, in turn, are teaching us all ...

Michael Sahota lists the four elements of empathy as defined by Theresa Wiseman and depicted in the image above. They are (lightly edited):

See their World – to be able to see the world as others see it. This means you cognitively understand what they are saying and can see it from their point of view.

Appreciate them as Human Beings / No-Judgement – restated the original “non-judgmental” in the the positive so it provides an actionable checklist. Judgement is another trap. We go into judgement to discount the person's situation to avoid experiencing their pain. For us to express empathy, we need to see the person as a human being – someone who is valuable in their own right. This can be very difficult to overcome.

Understand Feelings – to understand another person’s feelings. We need to get in touch with our emotions in order to truly connect with another person’s feelings. There is a lot of brain research on mirror neurons and how we are neurologically wired to relate to other human beings. A common reason to skip this element of empathy is that we don’t have our own emotions sorted out. So, you may need to do some of your own mental housekeeping in order to be in a place where you can acknowledge other peoples feelings.

Communicate Understanding – to communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings. The final element is that someone feels like they are understood – that they are seen and heard. A great phrase from Brene Brown to use as a starting point: “It sounds like you are in a hard place now. Tell me more about it.”

Most of us struggle with the communication part. Listening is a big chunk of what communication is about and a good place to start. We gravitate toward great listeners, they make us feel valued.

Conversation Agent

Conversation Agent focuses on business, technology, digital culture, and customer psychology. At Conversation Agent LLC, I help organizations and brands that want to build better customer experiences tell a new story.